I thrashed, and my hands scrabbled against rocks under the water, cold and slick. I clawed at them, trying to get my head above water. My head throbbed like it was going to explode. I was so disoriented I didn’t know which way was up until the soles of my feet hit rock and I pushed off, screaming.
I broke the surface and screamed out loud into the air. I couldn’t help it—pain was radiating from my knee up and down my leg, throbbing as my feet pressed against the rocks. The water was only waist-deep, but my legs wouldn’t hold me. I sank again, resting on my good knee as I tried to wipe my hair out of my face and open my stinging eyes. I could only use my right arm; the left was useless, dangling in the water in a dead mass of agony.
I pushed my hair back, gasping and sputtering, blinking the salt into my eyes. I was at the bottom of the cliff, below the Greer mansion. I had fallen to the rocks where the tide was coming in. The freezing waves shoved at me, jerking at my useless arm and trying to unbalance me on my one good leg. I remembered Lily’s hand gripping mine, the way she’d pulled me. Let’s go, she’d said. But I didn’t remember the fall itself. Was that a protective instinct in my brain, blocking out the fall? Or was that Lily?
Because as I’d fallen, she’d showed me everything.
The last night in the mansion. The confrontation with Beth. The ashtray. The bathtub.
How long had I fallen? Three seconds? Five? I’d seen all of it, the way you can dream a year’s worth of dreams in a twenty-minute nap. Instead of seeing the rocks and the ocean rushing up at me, I’d seen Lily die.
The waves pushed harder at me as the tide continued to come in, and I tried to move myself toward the rocky shore. My knee and my arm screamed at me, even though both were under icy water. I glanced down and saw that my left arm was hanging at a crazy angle below the elbow, the elbow itself the wrong shape. I forced myself to look away as my teeth chattered. I must have hit the rocks at the bottom of the water when I landed, though I didn’t remember it. I was probably lucky the tide was coming in, because if I’d hit the rocks without any water to break my fall, I’d be dead.
I moved my good leg and my good arm, pulling myself forward. I slipped and fell, then got purchase again. The pain was so bad I screamed, over and over, as I inched another step, and then another.
Did something touch the back of my neck?
I crawled faster, letting the pain wash over me. This is it, I thought grimly. Drowning or hypothermia—that’s how I’m going to go. Or maybe Lily will just grab me and finish me off. She could push my head under the water, kill me the way Beth had killed her. If she bothered, I wouldn’t be able to put up much resistance.
My body was shaking—adrenaline, fear, pain, shock, and cold taking over. My vision was blurred. I thought I saw a shape moving from the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t be sure. I lurched to the left as my damaged knee buckled again, and reached out with my good hand to break my fall. I was emerging slowly out of the water now, into the shallower depths on the rocky shore, beating the incoming tide.
My elbow was broken. I knew it; the pain was too much, and I could feel bone grind against bone as I limped over the rocks. I blinked and realized that there was something red in my eyes. I touched my forehead and found a gash, open and salty and bleeding. I pressed my fingers to it, remembering some long-ago first-aid tip about stanching a wound. My neck was wrenched, and even my teeth hurt. Where was I going to go from here? Where was the nearest house? My bag and my phone were long gone, vanished into the ocean, and, despite my situation, I mourned all of those interviews, all of my notes, drifting away on the current somewhere.
I managed to get into knee-deep water, and then I turned course along the shore, parallel to the cliffs. With the blood slowing its flow into my eyes, I could see that I was heading in the direction of Claire Lake proper, away from Arlen Heights. Far in the distance, the cliffs tapered down, toward the inland lake that gave the town its name. To my right were the cliffs, and to my left was the ocean. The only way to go was forward.
I didn’t know how long it would take me, and I didn’t know if I would make it before the tide came all the way in. My feet had long ago gone numb in their sneakers.
But I sloshed one foot in front of the other, and I started to walk.
* * *
—
I didn’t know how long I walked—it felt like hours. I was limping harder, barely able to put weight on my bad knee, and now that my arms were out of the water my left elbow was starting to swell. The sleeve of my shirt was tight and getting tighter, and the rising tide was up to my thighs.
I realized sluggishly that the wall of cliffs to my right had diminished. There was a path leading up the rise, and then a low wrought iron fence. I could glimpse something bright blue and bright yellow past the fence—a children’s slide, I realized. It was a playground.
The sky was getting dark, though I still had no idea what time it was. I changed course, leaving the water and pulling myself painfully up the path. There was no one on the playground. I limped to the swing set and lowered myself to one of the swings, shaking with cold.
There was a creak, and then movement at the corner of my eye, and a little boy appeared. He was seven or eight years old, maybe, wearing rubber boots and a thick wool coat, a wool cap on his head. He had come around the corner from the monkey bars and stood looking at me with his big brown eyes, keeping a wary distance away.
“Hi,” I managed to say, wondering how to sound unthreatening when sitting on a child’s swing, shaking and shivering and bleeding, my arm twisted at the wrong angle. “I’m hurt. Can you help me?”
The boy rubbed his fingers together in a nervous gesture, watching me but not coming any closer. He didn’t speak.
“Where’s your mother?” I asked him.
He pointed behind him, though I could only see the monkey bars and the other side of the fence.
“What’s your name?” I asked him as pain throbbed in my feet, which were no longer as numb as they had been in the ocean. My knee was seizing up, too; there was no way I was ever getting off this swing.
The boy spoke softly at first, and then he repeated himself: “Toby.”
“Toby,” I said. And then it hit me—this lonely place, this little boy, the absence of any other kids or parents. “Are you real?”
His eyes went wide. “Are you?”
Would a ghost ask me that? I didn’t know. Maybe not. “Yes,” I said. “I’m real, and my name is Shea. I need help. Can you find your mother for me?”
Toby took a step back, but he was still staring at me.
“Please,” I said to him, my voice thin with pain.
“Toby!”
A woman came through the gate, running. She was wearing jeans, a thick sweater, and a thick coat. She resembled her son, her hair in short twists, and she looked alarmed. “Toby, I told you not to go to the monkey bars! Get away from that lady!” She stopped when she got to the boy and looked at me. “Oh my God.”
The world faded out for a second, then came back into focus. “I had an accident,” I managed as the woman pulled her cell phone from her back pocket. “Can you call an ambulance, please?”
Stay awake, I thought as the woman dialed 911. Another half-forgotten piece of wisdom—weren’t you supposed to avoid passing out? Was that for a concussion or hypothermia? I couldn’t remember. I gripped the cold chain of the swing and tried to stay upright. I looked at Toby, whose back was pressed into his mother’s legs now. He was still watching me.
“Why didn’t you ask the lady?” he said as his mother spoke into the phone.
“What?” I said.
“The lady behind you. Why didn’t you ask her? Didn’t she want to help?”
I stared at him. I didn’t want to turn around. I couldn’t. “There’s a lady behind me?” I asked the boy, my voice almost a whisper.
He shook his head. “Not now. Before.” He pointed to a spot right behind the swing set. “She was right there.”